Putting It All Together

At my school I see the students for two rotations of about 36 consecutive class days. The rotations are never back to back so by the time they return for round 2 they have spent some time in other Unified Arts classes such as Music, Art, Health or PE. Instead of starting off with lectures on Newton's laws of motion or the concept of Trade Off's I like to get them back into the Tech Ed swing of things. So for a while now I've had them kick off the rotation by creating PowerPoint's (or more recently Google Presentations) addressing topics such as:

     - Show two things you learned in TE last time.
     - What did you like about your other UA's?
     - What are you looking forward to in TE this rotation?
     - Talk about two hobbies that you have.
 
I have been getting pretty bored with the PowerPoints and I think the kids have too. Especially after I make them take out all the LOLspeak, leet, slang, emoticons, animations and meme's. You would think I was subjecting them to the most unimaginable torture by the way, for requiring them to treat the presentations as "professional". The other funny response I get when explaining the guidelines is:

(say this really fast in a whiny voice)  "Mr. Lord, the only reason we can't use all that stuff is your just an old guy, who's a jealous hater, because you don't understand what any of that stuff means that we kids use!"

I wish I didn't know what any of it was! Please! Where is the undo button in my brain? If I hear or see YOLO  or nyan cat one more time... 93 million view by the way on YouTube for nyan cat. 93 MILLION. I am not sure what they says about us as a species but it can't be good.

So to change things up I had the students create Animoto's about the same topics.  Although I ran into a couple of issues it was a worthwhile project that engaged the students and is something I will do again in the future. Here are a couple of examples: